Unwed Couples Living Together Could (But Won't) Go to Jail

LANSING, MI – Oh, you sinners — er — lawbreakers.

Pardon the Freudian blunder, but in our defense, a Michigan law that makes it a misdemeanor crime — punishable by up to a year in jail and $1,000 fine — for a man and woman to engage in “lewd and lascivious cohabitation” outside of marriage does sound kind of biblical.

The law goes on to regulate “gross lewdness and lascivious behavior” — which, if it had been enforced (it hasn’t been, for decades), would have made Miley Cyrus’ Dead Petz tour that stopped in Detroit completely against the law.

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There is this comforting thought: Michigan’s not alone in making it illegal to shack up — or, for the more genteel, live together without benefit of clergy. It’s against the law in Mississippi, too, and was against the law in bathroom bill battling North Carolina, until it was recently struck down as unconstitutional.

OK, maybe that isn’t comforting.

The law will be scrubbed from the Michigan Code under a bill approved Tuesday by the Michigan Judiciary Committee and moved to the full Senate for consideration.

Sen. Steve Bieda, D-Warren, the bill’s sponsor, told the Detroit Free Press that the law isn’t being rubbed out just because it’s archaic and embarrassing, but also because it causes all sorts of tax return complications for sinners — er, lawbreakers.

If the lawbreaking unmarried couple had dependent children, they wouldn’t be able to claim an exemption for their household on tax returns, Bieda explained, because their relationship was “illegal.”

Bieda said he’d like to see “Michigan beat Mississippi” in removing the cohabitation law from the code.

So there’s that to hang on to.